


What Kind Of Man

by linguamortua



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Anal Sex, Bad Decisions, M/M, Masturbation, Meant To Be, Mutual Pining, Pining, Self-Denial, please stop reading my horrible self-indulgent fan fictions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-28
Updated: 2019-08-28
Packaged: 2020-09-28 08:30:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20422979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linguamortua/pseuds/linguamortua
Summary: Self-sabotage was extremely easy, but nothing about Nate was easy except wanting him.





	What Kind Of Man

By the time Tim got across camp and over the berm, the sun had dropped below the horizon and the wind was blowing cold ready for another endless night. He was still warm, so warm; heated from the inside out by a grinding, endless anger that never quite went away. Sweating with it. He crouched down, and then tipped back onto his ass and sat. His bootheels scratched up a cloud of dust and he dipped his face down into his scarf until it settled.

Somewhere back behind him, someone was yelling and someone else was yelling at him to shut up. About now, guys would be bickering over the contents of their MREs, and bitching about their COs, and digging out their graves. The endless churn and life while, in his tent, Godfather stewed up more ways to get them all killed. Tim could have screamed with the futility of it all. He realised that he was grinding his teeth and stopped. Last thing he needed was to bust a filling and spend the next month wishing for a dentist and knocking back painkillers.

He breathed deep through his nose, smelled the desert. He could no longer smell himself, which was a blessing. He thought he could taste blood. He knew it was dried onto his blouse sleeves still. The rage receded a few inches. In about fifteen minutes, someone was going to wonder if he had fucking dysentery and come looking for him, but for the moment he had solitude and an unimpeded view of a cloudless sky.

He looked up, wonderingly. There was no light pollution out there, just an endless field of stars.

Yesterday, he had listened with half an ear while Nate expounded professorially on constellations to the reporter. The man had the soul of an academic and the face of an undergrad. Tim had, in the past month, watched Nate shed ten pounds, gain a sore spot under the edge of his Kevlar, become red-eyed with sleep deprivation and develop a faint eye twitch. He was finding the complete picture strangely, surprisingly appealing.

Tim thought about Nate because if he contemplated anyone else in the camp, his primal scream would alert every fedayeen in the area. And if he thought about anyone from back home, he’d ugly cry.

He slid down the side of the berm a little more, getting his head all the way down onto the ground. The sweat on his lower back was starting to chill and the dirt pressed it back against his skin unpleasantly. Nate would be sweating inside his gear too, Tim reminded himself, preemptively turning his thoughts back towards small indignities (appropriate) and not the little notch in Nate’s forehead when he was trying not to speak his mind (inappropriate). Or, worse, the way his lower lip looked when it tightened with disapproval (deeply inappropriate). That particular visual gave Tim the curious, recursive mental image of Nate reading his mind and disapproving.

Tim swallowed, and tried to name the constellations.

Nate was several years younger than him, and a bad choice for that and many other reasons. The austere beauty of the night sky couldn’t quite chase those reasons away, but neither could Tim seem to recall any of them in detail right now. He supposed this was as close as he could get to romance, in the true sense of the word. Especially out here. Or maybe it was just sex, after all. Tim couldn’t clearly remember the last time he fucked someone he’d known for more than half an hour. He thought Nate might be a person he could get along with.

Expecting to be interrupted at any moment, Tim cast a weather eye left and right, and then eased his hand down the front of his pants. This was not something he did in the field. Something deep in his core, some egoistic tendency, had grown to like being called Doc. It was a mark of respect; he tried to own it, live up to it, use the leeway for good. Getting caught jacking off under a truck would, he thought, ruin his corpsman’s mystique. He didn’t care to test the theory, but neither was he interested in another cold and tedious night, unhappy, lonely, unfulfilled.

It had been a while.

His hand was rough and he was uncomfortably only at half-mast. Aware that he was on the clock, he sifted through his mental library of jerk-off material. At this point in his long personal celibacy, anything should have worked. But nothing did. Nothing, except (and Tim realised he was grinding his teeth again) the vision of Nate stripped to the waist back at Mathilda, and earnestly hammering in tent stakes with two of his guys. Tim wasn’t sure what did it for him more; the shirtlessness, or Nate’s willingness to pitch in. Or the way he’d straightened up, wiped the sweat from his face and smiled at Tim with the breathless and uncomplicated happiness of a young man doing gainful work.

Service would knock it out of him—probably already had—but joy was an emotion that suited Nate Fick’s face. Tim wanted to imagine Nate smiling at him at a ball game, in a bar, after getting well fucked. His cock jumped in his hand. Yeah, that was the shit. Mentally he laid Nate out on clean sheets. He couldn’t picture his own home; he put them in a hotel. White sheets and room service and a hot shower. His boots appeared, and his vest; he carefully erased them. White sneakers, he thought to his brain. Discarded t-shirt.

Fantasy Nate’s face kept getting dirty. His eyes got sadder and more tired. Each time, Tim, trying to stay hard, returned Nate to bright-eyed cleanliness. He knew what Nate’s smile looked like, damn it. It kept wavering. He tried to fix it there and almost lost it, almost went soft. He almost ground his teeth in frustration. _Let me have one thing,_ he thought with blasphemous desperation to a hazy notion of a deity that he didn’t even believe in.

One thing. He focused his mental camera, zoomed in. They were in the hotel room. Nate was on the bed. He zoomed in. Ignore the face. Nate’s hand on his cock, just like Tim’s was on his own right now. Square-tipped fingers. Clean fingernails. The smooth muscle of his inner thigh; the way his cock stood out redder and darker.

Where could he place himself in the picture? Tim imagined himself leaning against the wall. He was—he was just out of the shower. He was nude. Yes. Nate was waiting for him. There; the thought of Nate wanting him enough to stage manage an encounter made Tim breathe harder. He squeezed his cock, this time really feeling it. Nate was waiting, so he was already hard. Slowly jerking off. Tim pictured what he knew about Nate’s body. Its long, lean muscle, pale blond hair. The smooth, tight sweep of his belly with his hip bones bracketing it. Fantasy Nate gave Tim a smile that was nervous and excited and young and knowing all at once. Tim gritted his teeth, wanting it so badly that his chest ached. Nate was moving his mouth but Tim couldn’t call his voice to mind. He tried again. Nate was moving his mouth, not to speak but to lick his lower lip.

Tim made his dreamlike way across the floor and up onto the bed, crawling up Nate’s body. As he jerked himself off, sitting on rapidly-cooling sand in a desert, his knuckles brushed the inside of his thigh. He imagined that what he was feeling was the brush of Nate’s skin on his own. Maybe Nate’s hand touching him; his free hand, reaching out for Tim. He wanted Tim over him, on top of him, inside him.

_Wait_, Tim thought to fantasy Nate, wanting to tease him. _I want to come like this._ He wanted to kneel over Nate and come on his chest. Silently, he mouthed the words in the dark. He told Nate they have plenty of time. That Tim would fuck him later. Even in the privacy of his own mind, Tim couldn’t imagine fucking Nate.

So then what? Nate, very fair and very flushed down his neck and chest. He wanted to look up at Tim but his head was tipped back on the pillow and his eyes kept sliding closed. Tim watched Nate’s hand on his cock, and his own hand. He tried to remember what the touch of warm skin against his felt like. He thought he knew. His left hand was getting cold against his SAW, resting on the ground next to him as it must be. Instead, he imagined the warmth of Nate’s chest against his forearm.

His little fantasy went blurry then, less and less required as his body remembered what pleasure was. Still in the back of his mind was the knowledge that he had to be quick and quiet. His hand on his cock was automatic, mechanical. The sound of his hand rustling against his MOPP suit couldn’t be helped; but quickly, quickly now, he jerked off and let the fantasy dissipate. It was fragmentary as it dissolved. Nate’s green, green eyes, the long sweep of his clavicle, and an impression of a half-swallowed moan.

Tim came with a thready sigh, his eyes screwed shut.

He wiped his hand on the dirt and then the dirt on his pants. There wasn’t a man among them who’d showered in weeks, so it wasn’t like anyone would smell it on him. He pulled himself up to a crouch, automatically scanned the area, and then made his way over the berm and back down into camp.

Person was shrieking, as usual, and much closer there was the slap of hand on skin as someone got off. Tim trod carefully, avoiding the graves, and tried to walk like a man who didn’t just jerk off, whatever that looked like. In the expanse of dirt at the centre of the camp, inevitably, he met Nate.

‘Everything alright, Doc?’ Nate said with professional brusqueness. Sometimes, Tim liked to pretend that Nate talked to him in that way to conceal the fact that Nate really cared about him.

‘Fine,’ said Tim, and brushed past him so that their shoulders bumped in a way that he hoped desperately seemed rude.

‘Get some sleep,’ Nate called after him because he cared, impersonally, appropriately. So Tim did—but he dreamed of sweat and breath and skin, and an hour later woke with Nate's voice still in his head.

It was nowhere near dawn.

* * *

The problem was, Tim had already let matters go too far. He realised that now. What he had thought was just the beginning of a vicious and uncharacteristic interest in a colleague had in fact been brewing for some time.

He had vaguely thought his nocturnal excursion beyond the berm might make it easier to work with Nate. It didn’t. Matters were much worse. Nate seemed to be everywhere Tim went, checking in on people, explaining strategy, making sure his guys had what they needed. Worse, Nate’s courteous invitation to Tim to attend some of the team leaders’ meetings threw them into closer proximity than Tim would have chosen. Somehow, he always seemed to end up next to Nate. Nate would reach to draw a line up a map and they would touch briefly. Or they would all lean in so that Tim felt almost as though he could feel the vibration of Nate’s breath through the air next to him.

As much as he could, Tim arranged to be busy all the time. If he had to cradle stinking Marine feet all the way to fucking Baghdad he’d do it, just to avoid having to keep a neutral face when Nate was around him.

He made himself as scarce as possible.

Riding shotgun in Tim’s victor was Stinetorf, a blandly muscular young guy who didn’t fuck up with any particular regularity and didn’t run his mouth. With so much time on the road mechanically watching their sectors, Tim and Stiney got to talking.

Early on, Stiney asked, ‘Hey Doc, are you actually a doctor?’

Tim smiled into his scarf just a little. Stiney sounded like he was expecting the answer to be yes, and that pleased Tim. ‘No. I went through a few weeks of FMSS, that’s all.’ He omitted the rest; didn’t do to brag.

‘Is the company surgeon a surgeon?’

‘Physician.’

‘Huh.’ Stiney chewed it over for a while. ‘Glad you’re here in case we get fucked up.’

Later that afternoon, Tim treated Jacks for a four day old blister that was showing signs of infection. Stiney sat on his heels and watched, appalled but fascinated, and passed Tim whatever he asked for. As Jacks strode away, Stiney whistled low.

‘Grosses me out, man,’ he said, and Tim had to laugh. So he had a new distraction, and it was good. Stiney listened and learned and shadowed Tim around like an eager little brother. Coaching Stiney was the perfect excuse to avoid getting sucked into Nate’s orbit. Nobody could argue that it wasn’t a productive use of Tim’s time.

All the while he was with Stiney, or treating someone, or digging out and refilling his grave, or hauling supplies even though he was last on the list of people who had to do it; all the time he was busy, he didn’t have to talk to Nate.

It was the perfect solution.

Until Ray arrived at Tim’s metaphorical doorstep in a flurry of skinny limbs and urgency. He was sweat-streaked; they all were. They’d been through heavy fire and calm in obnoxious cycles, with barely enough time to let the ringing in their ears dissipate before the next corner and the next set of guys they had to take out.

‘LT needs you, Doc.’

Tim’s heart tugged horribly in his chest, and he concentrated on hauling his backpack straps over his shoulders as if there was nothing unusual about the request.

‘What happened?’ he asked on the way down the line of humvees. How and where exactly they were to pull into the empty field was apparently still being debated. Nate, it seemed, couldn’t wait. Tim almost left Ray in the dust, so the guy had to catch up before he could reply.

‘Shrapnel to the face. I didn’t see much except a shitload of blood, dude.’

A shitload of blood just about covered it. Covered, in fact, half Nate’s face, and down his neck. His collar was soaked with it, and so was the wadded-up scarf he was pressing to his temple. He was still sitting on the passenger side of the vehicle. Tim manoeuvred his backpack onto the floor of the humvee and slid into the driver’s seat. Gunny Wynn watched, stone-faced.

‘Thanks for coming, Doc,’ Nate said calmly, as if Tim were doing him a small social favour. Tim hurried on a pair of gloves, and then peeled back the scarf.

‘Get your hands out the way.’ Tim heard his own voice as if from very far away. A flat monotone, all business.

‘Sorry.’

A thin, broken line from the edge of Nate’s left eyebrow into his hairline. Tim could see exactly how it had happened. A shard of metal, a splinter of wood, propelled at speed along the fragile plane of Nate’s sphenoid bone. Narrow enough to slip under the wide lip of his helmet, sliding into the finger’s breadth of space. Millimetres weren’t in it. The wound had a ragged edge, opening like a little mouth. Tim pressed a square of gauze to it.

‘It’s probably nothing,’ he said shortly, hunting for butterfly strips in his pack with his left hand. ‘Head wounds always bleed a lot.’

Nate looked across at Tim, his eyes a very clear green in the swamp of dirt and blood covering his face. ‘Tough love?’ he asked.

‘I don’t think this is getting you a day off, put it that way.’ Tim lifted the edge of the gauze. The wound still bled. ‘We’re going to be here a while.’

Nate lifted his eyebrows in silent acceptance, and then let his eyes slide closed. Tim worked his fingers along the ridge of Nate’s skull, feeling for damage. There was nothing, because the universe apparently loved him and had contrived to give him a flesh wound where he could easily have had a shattered skull. The helmet was at Nate’s feet, tipped upside down. A dark splinter was lodged inside the lining. Its wicked edge protruded an inch or so out.

Nate bled. Around them, a loose perimeter was established and it was understood that they would wait for Doc to work whatever magic they earnestly believed he was capable of. As if magic were required. Tim added another piece of gauze to the wad in his hand, and cradled Nate’s skull in his left hand so he could apply more pressure with the right.

‘This doesn’t feel like a good thing,’ Nate said drowsily, his eyes still closed. He hadn’t so much as twitched with Tim’s hands on him.

‘Should’ve kept your fucking head inside the vehicle,’ Tim told him. ‘Sir.’

‘I was covering my sector,’ Nate said mildly. For the sake of both his professional relationship with Nate and his career, Tim knew he should shut his mouth. So he didn’t point out that Nate could have just as well covered his sector from inside the humvee, or that his Kevlar wasn’t a forcefield, or that there were many people in the world who wanted Nate’s brain inside his head and not distributed in an even layer around the interior of his vehicle. Instead he focused on keeping even pressure on Nate’s wound and running through his automatic list of concussion-related questions.

‘Feel nauseous?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘Headache?’

‘No more than usual.’

‘How’s your vision?’

‘It’s fine. I’m not concussed.’

‘Stop showing off,’ Tim told him. He checked under the gauze; nothing but a slow seeping, now.

‘Knowing the signs of a concussion is bar trivia,’ Nate said. He smiled and opened his eyes. Tim busied himself with tearing open a prep pad so that he didn’t end up looking into Nate’s eyes and smiling back. He had a goddamn job to do, and he was already in too deep with Nate Fick.

The alcohol wipe must have stung, but Nate didn’t make a sound as Tim cleaned the wound thoroughly. Then, a neat row of butterfly stitches, and a thin sliver of dressing. Everything was filthy; what might have healed well left to its own devices had to be protected. Tim wasn’t in the habit of playing games with the wellbeing of his guys. He was cautious.

‘Christ,’ he said, leaning back to look at Nate’s face. ‘I’m gonna clean you up. All that effort will be wasted if you get it infected.’

In the side pocket of his bag was a package of baby wipes. He cleaned Nate’s face, careful around the delicate skin of his eyes. As he worked, he could see Nate’s eyes moving under his eyelids, the gentle flicker of his pulse in his neck. He cleaned around Nate’s lower lip. There was a long and delicious moment where Tim could, with total honesty and professionalism, watch Nate’s mouth. Nate lifted his chin to let Tim run the wipe down the line of his jawbone and neck.

‘Wasted effort,’ Nate said. He sounded amused but his voice was scratchy with sleeplessness. ‘I’ll be dirty again the minute I step out the humvee.’

‘Who’s the corpsman here, me or you?’ Tim asked irritably. For a moment there had been a whisper-fine electrical charge between his fingers and Nate’s skin, and Nate had broken the spell. Nate laughed, just a little snort. His nose twitched. Tim chose not to look at Nate’s nose, or his mouth, or his pale green eyes with their perfect outline of grey.

‘Are you done?’ Nate asked, finally getting restless. The front couple of humvees were finally pulling into the field. Whatever conference had needed to happen to decide how to fucking park had occurred.

‘I’m done,’ Tim said, crumpling the waste into his pocket. He reached down for Nate’s Kevlar and pulled the shard out of the lining. It was metal, he saw now, and far longer than he had thought. The jagged edge gripped the Kevlar and made it hard to pull out. When he held it up into the light for Nate to look at, Nate mouthed _wow_.

‘Close call,’ he said, and for the first time Tim heard the finest tremor of uncertainty in his voice.

‘Close call.’ Tim flicked the splinter out the window. ‘Get some rest.’

‘Can’t,’ Nate said, but Tim ignored him and climbed out the humvee before he said anything more incriminating. He retreated to the top of his own victor, where he could busy himself with not being at all busy and watch from a distance. From far away, it wouldn’t look like he was watching at all.

Tim unequivocally approved of Mike Wynn; had done for a while, in fact. There was a guy who knew the fine art of managing upwards. Not half an hour after the humvees were arrayed in two long, even rows with cammie nets out, Wynn was urging Nate to sleep. Pretending to pay attention to repacking his medical supplies, Tim watched Wynn herd Nate into the back of their humvee and then release the canvas so that there was some privacy and a little less light.

So Nate wasn’t concussed, and Tim had watched men fight with worse than a reasonably circumstantial head wound. But Wynn’s strategy here was clearly the same as Tim’s: any excuse to get the guy to rest. A mistake made in the throes of exhaustion would get you killed just as surely as one made from sheer stupidity. And half the time, Nate’s ability to rally and resolve other people’s mistakes seemed to be the only thing actively working to keep them alive. An attractive quality.

_Great,_ Tim thought to himself as he retrieved a couple of marker pens from the depths of his bag and slipped them into a pocket, _I like it when he fucking saves me_.

Back in college, he’d had had a girlfriend who used to stop by his apartment when he was pulling an all-nighter. She used to bring coffee, and bagels, or donuts, and warm them through in the oven. Listen to him review his notes and test him for his exams. Run him a bath, do his laundry. At twenty, Tim had still been young enough to pretend a uniquely masculine form of helplessness, and she had risen to the occasion every time. He’d liked it when she swooped in to save him. So much so, that he’d developed a habit of needing to be saved.

He’d thought he was over it, but here he was, and here Nate was.

Tim was plagued by a constant desire to know where Nate was and what he was doing at all times. It felt like tinnitus.

Outside a nameless village: an endless expanse of sand, the acrid smell of recent artillery fire and a young woman lying still and tear-stained under Tim’s hands.

‘I wish I could speak Arabic.’ Stiney whispered it across their patient, and Tim grimaced in reply. So did he, sometimes, so they wouldn’t have to filter information through Meesh. But if he spoke Arabic then he’d be insulated even less from the raw, wailing grief of the young woman who crouched by their patient’s head, rocking back and forth on her heels with blood soaking her clothes and hands.

Life in the field was an abundance of distractions. The presence of a mission. The absence of a mission. The presence of too many people. The absence of those people one wanted around. The presence or absence of this food or that, this inconvenience or that, of sleep, of quiet, of artillery or sniper fire, and so on and on and on. Any one of those things might be the defining distraction of a given moment. It was hard for Tim to give a shit about the contents of his MRE, for example, when he hadn’t slept in nearly 24 hours.

Her grief was a distraction. So he didn’t notice Nate until he spoke.

'How are we doing?' Nate had come up behind Tim quietly and put a hand on his shoulder. Its reassuring weight lingered a notch longer than Tim expected. He wanted to touch Nate’s fingers. Hasser casually touched people like that all the time and nobody cared.

'Fine.' It wasn't fine, not at all, but his patient was alive and would continue to be at least until the inevitable secondary infection set in, so Tim was willing to lie.

'How are _you_ doing?' Nate clarified. He took his hand away and crouched down next to Tim.

'Fine,' Tim snapped. 'Better without interruption, sir.'

There was a pause. Nate hardly breathed.

Then he said simply, 'I'll leave you to your work.' No hint of annoyance in his voice. He was capable of controlling his emotions. Nate walked away. From the other side of their patient Stiney gave him a long look that was doubtless supposed to be meaningful. Tim ignored it. Stiney leaned in, wrinkling an empty gauze packet with his knee.

'Is everything okay with you guys?'

‘What happens between me and the LT is none of your goddamn business, Stiney,’ Tim told him. ‘Keep pressure on that—and quit the gossip.’

Stiney’s mouth snapped shut. Applying a tourniquet and carefully writing the time on the prone woman’s forearm was absorbing enough that Tim managed to stop himself from saying anything else. He’d already said too much. Anyone who overheard was going to assume that he and Nate were at odds.

They weren’t. Or rather, Nate wasn’t. It was all Tim himself.

Two more days, three more days of sand and light-to-moderate fire didn’t improve Tim’s mood. He was going a little crazy, he thought. It was hard to remember the date, let alone the day of the week. Hours passed and day and night came, but Tim was adrift from reality and anything but the heat and sound and smell of Iraq, of motor exhaust, of cordite, of sweat, of blood, of antiseptic, of candy warmed and melted together and crammed into Stiney’s mouth.

During the day he sweltered and burned and tried to pay attention to his sector. At night, his sweat chilled him unpleasantly and he brooded, taking whatever watch he could just so that he could finally pass out and sleep when he was done.

As the sun slid below the horizon, Brad caught up with Tim making his careful way along a crumbling berm towards a convenient rock. It was Tim’s watch and he wanted not to sit on the ground for four hours. A rock would be a minor luxury at this point.

‘Doc,’ said Brad, reaching out to grab Tim’s arm. Tim stopped.

‘I’m on watch.’

‘Me too.’ Brad looked very much like he was about to start another awkward conversation.

‘Is it important?’

‘Yeah.’ Brad scanned the horizon absently. ‘Stop fucking with Hasser.’

‘With Hasser?’

‘Whatever he did to piss you off, let it go.’

‘Tell Hasser to mind his goddamn business.’

‘About?’

‘Everything.’

The tight little smile that Brad wore when he was right and knew it came out to play. He looked down on Tim from his significant height advantage.

‘About you and the LT, then.’

‘Is everyone fucking gossiping, Brad, or just your team?’

‘Nobody’s gossiping. But when you start acting like he stole your song and dance for the big beauty pageant, people notice, Doc.’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘It’s not nothing. LT’s pissed about it. Which means I get to be pissed about it. I don’t want to be pissed about shit.’

‘You having cosy chats with him about it, too?’ Tim asked, knowing that Brad wasn’t, couldn’t. That maybe Mike Wynn was the only person who could call Nate out on something like this.

‘I’m telling you to get your shit together,’ Brad told him, not answering the question.

‘Yeah, well. Tell the LT to talk to me himself.’ He said it knowing that Brad wouldn’t, and that he was, for now, still safe.

He always wanted what he couldn’t have. Why would Nate be any different?

The only option left was to white-knuckle through it. Tim tried. In the dark, lying uncomfortably in the shallow hole that would allegedly protect him from concussive blasts or flying shrapnel, he consciously tried to not care. He did that bullshit exercise where he paid attention only to his breath and tried to let thoughts go. He imagined being home and never seeing Nate again.

They crawled closer to Baghdad. Tim tried to shut everything down except the job. Even Stiney told him once, hesitantly, that he was _weirding the guys out_.

‘Good,’ said Tim, and smiled with all his teeth showing. It was a garbage answer, but it had the flavour of mystery and Stiney disappeared, looking impressed and creeped out in equal measure.

Closer again to Baghdad.

If Tim was unusually fucked up it didn’t matter, because so was everyone else. There had been an initial period—the first three days? The first week?—when the platoon had been suffused with a kind of high-octane, feverish delight at finally doing their jobs. Some of the younger guys had radiated with it. It was a sense, perhaps, of invulnerability. Like everything they’d trained for would come to pass, because everything else had happened exactly as they’d been taught.

Now all of them had experienced the same unique horrors. They’d all seen the same casualties, taken the same fire, been steeped in the same sights and sounds and smells. Sure, they were keeping it together for the most part. But Tim’s particular suffering faded conveniently into the background.

Baghdad, finally, with its riot of noise and life. The city was vast and felt labyrinthine after so much time spent passing through hamlets and villages. Tim walked around with a constant sense of vertigo; here they were, this was the end, was it the end? Did he want it to be?  
On the top level of a cigarette factory where they were billeted, Tim found a balcony. He stood out on it, knowing that it was a stupid idea in a hostile city. He looked out over the streets and buildings, the parks and people.

‘It wasn’t what either of us could have hoped for, was it?’ Nate had come up beside Tim silently. He rested his forearms on the railing and they looked down over the ruins of the city. They were alone up on the balcony. Tim stopped breathing.

‘It could’ve played out differently,’ Tim said. Tentative but truthful.

‘I keep running over in my mind what could have been.’ Nate turned his head a little. Tim caught the movement out of the corner of his eye but didn’t meet Nate’s gaze, couldn’t meet it. He had imagined this conversation and now that it was here, he could remember nothing about what he’d wanted to say.

‘We had jobs to do,’ Tim said. No time for sentiment.

‘A full scale assault of a country in humvees,’ Nate said ruefully, but with a laugh. ‘I mean, it’s the absurdity that really gets me every time. It’s almost performance art.’

The job. Of course.

‘You got us all out alive.’

‘Can’t take sole credit for that, Doc.’ Tim responded to ‘Doc.’ He looked at Nate, who gave him a brisk little smile. ‘That’s partly your area.’

Tim dropped his eyes and got distracted by the fine blond hair on Nate’s wrists, the long line of his hand and his blunt, boyish fingers.

_I love you,_ he thought, trying it on for size. Feeling it out.

‘Thanks,’ he said instead. He looked away from Nate’s hand; away from Nate entirely, gazing off at the horizon as if a once-in-a-lifetime event were suddenly occurring and couldn’t be missed. He let the seconds pass.

Nate cleared his throat and straightened up, his gear creaking and rustling. There was a particular way that he pulled his shoulders back and lifted his chin, which was transparently to make himself look older and more authoritative. It always made Tim weak with a horrible tenderness that he couldn’t escape. He didn’t need to watch to know that Nate was doing that now.

‘Anyway,’ said Nate. ‘It’s been a pleasure working with you.’

‘Right,’ said Tim, hearing himself say it with reflexive sarcasm, drawing the word out long. The notion that anything about this fucked up invasion had been _pleasurable_ was absurd. That Nate was thanking him for an appropriate work experience was even more so. Nate’s chin gave an assertive little twitch, and he pushed himself away from the railing.

‘There’s never any time for anything but the job with you, is there?’ He walked away, leaving Tim frozen with his forearms still pressed to the hot metal of the balcony railing. _Wait_, he wanted to say. _It’s not the job, it’s not the job at all. I think about you constantly._ But already Nate’s boots were echoing away down the stairs. Tim had blown his only private chance to open the door for Nate.

Then again, Nate was so transparently not interested that perhaps it had been for the best.

Hurt, as it so often did, slowly transmuted itself into anger. Nate Fick would never get angry at someone else for a mistake he himself had made. Nate Fick would never compromise his mindset in the field with sweaty teenage daydreams. Nate Fick would never jerk off to a colleague. The litany grew longer by the hour; Nate Fick would never, Nate Fick would never.

It would be too hard to find another chance like the balcony. There was no hope of unpicking the mess that Tim had inadvertently created with his own shitty attitude. So they didn’t speak. They managed to avoid each other with an unprecedented level of success for those last two days.

‘You need to get out of here, homes,’ Person said to Tim, even as they took inventory together. ‘You looked like someone fucked your mom in front of you.’

‘Thanks,’ Tim said dryly, not even able to be amused by Person’s graphic reenactment of the act.

‘Hey, no offense to your mom,’ Person said as an afterthought, disentangling himself from the kit bag.

‘None taken.’ Tim walked away. He took a wide line around the perimeter, looking like he was doing something without actually having to speak with anyone. The guys were clustered around the victors still, for the most part. Somehow, even with a series of building to camp out in, they stuck with their teams. Nobody really wanted to be alone. Except Tim. At least, being alone was preferable to most of the available company right now. He walked, and he listened to the mindless gossip that floated through the hot, dry air.

As the sun dropped lower in the sky and the shadows threw themselves long and unearthly across the camp, Tim made a bad decision. It was at least his second bad decision of the day. Under the circumstances, he later thought to himself, that was a pretty good average given everything that had happened to him over the past few weeks.

It took him a while to find the house about which he had heard rumours. There was nothing that could be done about what he was wearing, so he drew eyes as he walked down the street of the tiny town near where the Corps was temporarily billeted, waiting to go home. Two bored guys from Alpha had waved him out of camp with nothing more than a knowing smile. Technically, he wasn’t supposed to leave. But Tim had built up a stock of capital, and he was perversely in the mood to blow it. He could reasonably take for granted the fact that the guys would cover for him.

The house had a faded blue door with a door handle painted brightly and jarringly in yellow. Tim stood and looked at it for a moment. There was no harm in going inside, taking a look. He had dollar bills in his back pocket and the contents of a couple humanitarian rations in his pack. That he had planned this far sickened him. But not enough to stop him reaching for the door handle and turning it, just as a burst of female laughter trilled out from a window.

‘Doc?’

Tim turned and saw Nate standing in the middle of the dusty street, his SAW hanging from its strap over his shoulder and his notebook in his hand. And just behind him, as always, Mike Wynn. Mike had a wad of dip in his cheek and the corner of his mouth was dimpling up in amusement around it. Tim hardly registered it.

All of his focus sharpened in on Nate’s face; tired, confused, dismayed. Disappointed. Tim had seen disappointment on Nate’s face often enough to easily recognise it.

He turned, pushed open the door, and went inside. He didn’t look back.

* * *

At first, Tim ignored the knocking at his door. It was nine in the evening, he had just opened a beer, and there was a stack of library books calling his name. The simple pleasures of being back home. He wasn’t expecting any visitors, and usually anyone knocking at this hour was trying to sell him something. But the knocking was persistent and brisk. Its rhythm—a triple tap, a pause, then another triple tap—felt somehow familiar, readable. Tim hauled himself out of his chair with a curse and went to the door.

Nate stood on the shabby welcome mat. He looked neat and clean and notably well-rested, blandly youthful in a navy polo shirt and dark blue jeans.

‘Hi,’ said Tim, warily. He didn’t smile. Neither did Nate. With a little lift of his chest, Nate took a breath and began speaking very deliberately.

‘I’ve been reflecting,’ he said, in a reasonable facsimile of his usual crisp confidence, ‘and I don’t think the prostitute was a dealbreaker for me.’

Tim stared at him for a moment. He hadn’t seen Nate in weeks, and this was his greeting. Nate stared back, his chin raised defiantly. His mouth had a resolute set to it that dared Tim to not immediately close the door in his face. Tim never could resist a dare.

‘Maybe don’t display my many failings to my neighbours,’ he said at last, stepping away from the door and gesturing Nate inside.

‘Wasn’t sure you still lived here,’ Nate said. He stood on the doormat and removed his shoes, meticulously lining them up with the toes against the wall.

‘Abusing your authority to find my address is low, Lieutenant.’ Tim felt the old anger bubble up in him again. Tamping it down had been harder since he got home. And yet, he wanted Nate in his house, so where did that leave him? He paced over to the kitchen and opened the fridge for beer, wanting something to do with his hands. ‘Want one?’ Without waiting for an answer, he took the bottle opener off the fridge and popped the lids off. He’d drink them both anyway if Nate wouldn’t.

‘Sure. I took a cab over.’ He reached for it and his index finger knocked against Tim’s thumb. Then he leaned back against the kitchen island. Something about his posture and the way his hair was growing out made him look, against all the odds, like a college kid. Tim felt grimy and well-worn by comparison, in his old t-shirt and sweatpants.

Nate was looking into the all but empty fridge, so Tim reached out to close it.

‘I need to go grocery shopping,’ he said.

‘No kidding.’ Nate paused. ‘Do you typically drink alone?’

‘Why would you ask me that, I wonder?’

Nate gave a quick laugh. ‘No food in the fridge but you’re halfway through a case of beer.’

‘You caught me on grocery day.’

_Is it bad, Doc?_

_You’re going to be fine, buddy. Keep breathing._

Lying, as it turned out, was a transferable skill.

‘Anyway, it’s not privileged information,’ said Nate. He took a pull from his beer and Tim watched his soft, pink mouth open and close around the neck of the bottle. After he swallowed, Nate licked his lower lip. ‘Your address,’ he clarified. His index finger was pick, pick, picking away at the beer label, pulling one corner off. Nate probably wasn’t even aware he was doing it.

‘You need a hobby,’ Tim said. He took a pull of his beer and watched the strangely delicate way that Nate furrowed his brow when he didn’t understand something.

‘In what sense?’

‘In the sense that you’re showing up at my house when you could be hiking, or biking, or taking pretty girls to the pictures, or whatever wholesome pastime might suit you.’

‘Does being an asshole get you laid?’ Nate fired back. ‘Does it work for you—is that why you do it?’

‘I don’t have any trouble getting laid,’ Tim said, hating himself for feeling compelled to clarify.

Nate made a hand gesture like a helicopter taking off. ‘This whole hard drinking bachelor lifestyle says otherwise,’ he said.

‘You’re welcome to finish your beer and leave,’ said Tim. He snapped his mouth shut.

‘I came all this way,’ Nate said. ‘And it’s good beer.’

‘You weren’t invited.’

Tim had been to a psychotherapist before, and so he knew exactly what he was doing in specific terms.

‘Have I misjudged the situation?’ Nate’s laugh was sharp and unconvincing. He looked at the floor, and then away out the window. ‘I thought we had some kind of—’ He made a twirling gesture with one hand, searching for the right word.

Self-sabotage was extremely easy, and nothing about Nate Fick was easy except wanting him. Tim chewed on the inside of his cheek and looked at Nate, looked at Nate looking at him, and Nate broke first and looked away.

Okay.

‘You didn’t misjudge.’ Tim suddenly realised that his beer was empty, and he set the bottle on the counter.

‘Then why are you so goddamn reluctant to take me to bed?’

Tim wanted to laugh and point out that only the nightgowned starlets of Old Hollywood used phrases like _take me to bed_. But he found that he was already moving towards Nate, who met him in the middle of the narrow kitchen like a heat-seeking missile. Before he could reconsider anything, Tim crushed their mouths together. He shoved Nate back against the fridge. Nate went without resistance, opening his mouth for Tim’s tongue and grabbing at his shirt. At the feel of Nate’s tongue against his, white-hot sparks erupted behind Tim’s closed eyelids, irresistibly like artillery lighting up the horizon at night. Everything went febrile and confusing, and before he could consciously stop himself Tim had a leg between Nate’s thighs and both his hands under Nate’s shirt on his lower back.

It didn’t matter that Nate was a good half-head taller; he was melting into Tim, one arm slung around his neck and the other against the fridge for support.

‘Oh, okay,’ Nate said against Tim’s mouth. That didn’t mean anything and Tim didn’t fucking want him to talk. He shut Nate up with another kiss; one that was harder, meaner. Nate opened his mouth for it and his fingers twisted into the left shoulder of Tim’s shirt. A fridge magnet clattered to the floor and bounced over Tim’s foot.

Nate mapped the inside of Tim’s mouth with his tongue, while undoing the two buttons of his own polo shirt with one hand. He was being thorough, in a way that Tim could only describe as indefinably Natelike. Gathering intelligence, he thought.

Tim came up for air, forgetting how to kiss and breathe through his nose at the same time.

‘This is adolescent,’ he observed into Nate’s cheek. He had something else to say but he was noticing the little blond hairs just in front of Nate’s ear, which he needed very badly to kiss. So he did that, and then he had to kiss Nate’s ear, and just under it, and by the time he had finished he’d forgotten what his original complaint was in the first place.

‘Where’s the bedroom?’ Nate asked eventually, his voice sounding blurry against the corner of Tim’s mouth. Tim somehow couldn’t answer but he got them moving, stumbling over the fridge magnet on the floor with a curse. Nate’s body was distractingly pressed against his, but there was something desperate about it. The thought trickled into Tim’s brain as they crossed the threshold of his bedroom, and it took root.

‘Wait,’ he said with difficulty.

Nate froze against him. ‘Uh,’ he began.

Tim let out a long, shuddering sigh and peeled himself off Nate. He held him by the shoulders.

‘God. Okay. Look, it’s a weird time for this.’

‘In your life?’ Nate’s brow furrowed.

‘What? No, I mean—’ For once, Tim didn’t know exactly what he meant. ‘I haven’t showered in a couple days.’

‘You smell fine,’ Nate said, leaning hungrily towards him. ‘Better than fine. Good.’ Tim’s grip on Nate’s shoulders tightened.

‘I got screwed up over you for a while,’ said Tim in one confessional rush. He wasn’t exactly sure what his objective was in this conversation, but at least he knew he was putting it out there, telling the truth. He was opening the door for it. His thumb found the edge of Nate’s polo shirt sleeve and crept underneath it.

‘Define ‘a while’,’ said Nate.

‘Whole time I knew you, minus about a week.’

Nate gave a disbelieving laugh, eyes wide. ‘That’s ludicrous.’

‘It’s true.’

‘But why—’

‘You’re seriously asking why? You’re here and you’re asking that?’ _Who the fuck did that_, thought Tim to himself.

‘Well, it wasn’t like that for _me_,’ Nate told him defensively. ‘I didn’t realise for ages.’

‘Sorry to disappoint.’

‘I didn’t mean that.’ Nate finally shrugged Tim’s hands off and exhaled heavily. ‘We can wait,’ he said, like pulling teeth. His face arranged itself one way and then another. Nate was puzzling through something, like an approach to an ambush he knew was there, but thought he might be able to punch through. ‘What do you think will happen if we do this?’

It wasn’t a worried question. It was fact-finding. Nate wanted Tim’s opinion, in the same way that he would say, _should we casevac this guy or not, give me the pros and cons_. Tim had to think about it. ‘Nothing, obviously. Not nothing—it’ll be good. Nothing bad.’

‘You could have said something earlier but you didn’t.’ Nate frowned.

‘We were working.’

‘We were working when you thought about going to a—’

‘Yeah, thanks for reminding me.’

‘I liked you from the start,’ Nate said. ‘I mean, it took me a while to cotton on to the rest. Mike had to help me along on that one. But I liked you, and I knew you liked me.’

‘You shouldn’t. I’m an asshole, you know that.’

‘No, I don’t know that, actually.’

‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ said Tim. He ran his hand over the back of his skull. ‘Let’s do dinner. Tomorrow. Properly. Wait—are you even staying in town?’

‘What if I just slept in your bed,’ said Nate, his hands finding Tim’s chest, moving idly over his shirt. ‘And then we can do this in the morning.’

Tim was exhausted from the effort of making any and all decisions surrounding Nate.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘But I’m taking the side by the window.’

The microwave clock told him it was almost bedtime. The thought of sitting on the couch with Nate and another beer, in the minutes after bailing on what would probably be frighteningly good sex, was unbearable. He watched as Nate got himself a glass of water and then started to drink it half-leaning over the sink. While Nate’s mouth was occupied, Tim sloped off to the bathroom and mechanically performed the necessary functions. He didn’t turn the light on so that he didn’t have to look at himself in the mirror.

He had a fresh toothbrush from his last dental appointment and he left it on the bathroom counter for Nate.

‘Your turn,’ he told Nate on the way out.

In the bedroom he hovered for a moment between his bed and his dresser. Was it trying too hard to put on clean boxers? Was sleeping naked as usual too obvious? The status quo won; he dropped his sweatpants on the floor and crawled into bed as he was, lights off, hoping to avoid temptation.

Nate arrived ten minutes later, almost silently. Tim heard the gentle sound of clothing on skin, and then felt the vibrations of Nate’s hands feeling along the edge of the bed and peeling back the comforter. He slid in, barely breathing, and then there was stillness and near-silence. Somehow, Tim fell asleep.

Sometime after midnight, Tim woke with a jolt because it was his turn to stand watch. He was much too warm, and acutely aware that there was someone else in the room with him. He knew this because there was a leg between his, and an arm lying heavily across his waist. For a moment he lay very still, taking it in.

Nate.

Perhaps it was a change in his breathing that woke Nate, or maybe he’d moved. Or perhaps Nate hadn’t really been asleep either. Or he was subject to the same screwed up body clock as Tim was. Whatever the case, he shifted slightly and Tim felt the beginnings of stubble drag against his chest.

‘Technically,’ Nate said grainily, ‘it’s probably morning by now.’

‘Technically,’ repeated Tim. Already his heart rate had started to pick up. He relocated his right arm, which had no feeling in it, so that it was under Nate’s pillow. His left hand wandered over Nate’s hip and up his back, settling in between his shoulder blades. Nate sighed and shifted in closer. Suddenly, Tim didn’t care that he was too warm. His fingertips gently rubbed Nate’s back.

‘That’s nice,’ Nate sighed. The memory of Nate’s resolute mouth and dirty face came back to Tim, bringing with it the usual anger. This time, on Nate’s behalf; how dare there be dirt, how dare there be stupidity, how dare there be violence. He settled in, rubbed Nate’s back some more. Tried to shake the Pavlovian reaction he had to thinking about Nate. This wasn’t a warzone. They were in Tim’s bed, quiet, warm, together.

‘Sorry I was so fucking cagey earlier,’ he said into Nate’s scalp.

‘We’ve established you’re an emotional creature,’ Nate said, and Tim could hear him smiling as he said it.

‘I was going to offer to put my hands other places,’ said Tim, ‘but maybe now I won’t.’

Nate snorted. ‘That’s okay.’ He turned in Tim’s arms, jamming his knee into the tender part of Tim’s inner thigh. Then he shifted a few inches down the bed on his elbow, and again, saying ‘_I_ was going to—’

‘Wait,’ said Tim. ‘Don’t.’

Nate’s face came up, incredulous even in the almost-dark.

Tim shoved at Nate’s hip until he rolled onto his back and relocated downward. The thought crossed his mind that he had never much liked sucking dick, and suddenly it seemed as strange and jejune as saying that one didn’t like beer, or oysters, or jazz; the sort of childish opinion that anyone could see was evidence of not having acquired an _acquired taste_. Already Nate’s breath was very fast and quick, and his hands were pressed down against the mattress, working not to hover. Tim made quick work of Nate’s boxers, shoving them down around his thighs. It was impossible not to want to taste him.

If Nate wasn’t yet all the way hard, there was evidence that it was happening and that was enough for Tim. Nate was a little sweaty from sleep, but Tim had never been squeamish. And it was Nate—in his apartment, in his bed, in not very many clothes. At the first touch of Tim's tongue, Nate sucked in a little breath, and then he laughed.

'Thought this would never happen,' he said happily.

'Think about it a lot, out there?' Tim let his mouth touch Nate's dick as he spoke, lips vibrating against it. Nate didn’t reply. He just shivered and panted, waiting, waiting for Tim to do something. Too polite to ask, or to reach for him. ‘I’ll take that as a yes.’

The air was very warm and humid, and Tim was still fuzzy from sleep. He propped himself up on his elbows and blew Nate with a slowness and langor that was somehow more erotic than it should be. He kept his eyes closed and listened to the sound of Nate’s breathing. The head of Nate’s cock dragged along the inside of his cheek, over his tongue. Tim was sure he had pictured this in his imagination, but he couldn’t remember what the fantasies had been like.

It was only when Nate’s hips were lifting off the bed, and his fingers were screwing the sheets into damp knots, that Tim finally pulled away and looked up at him.

‘What else?’ Tim asked, in a rush of generosity. ‘What else can I do?’

Nate came up on his elbows, mouth open.

‘Anything?’ Very faintly Tim could see the shadowy sweep of his lashes on his cheeks.

‘Tell me.’ He nosed along the inside line of Nate’s thigh, along the delineation of his quad and down to the ticklish inner part of his knee.

‘Oh, come on.’ Nate groaned it out, one hand finding the back of Tim’s head. ‘What did I even come here for?’

‘That’s what I’m asking.’ Tim knew he was being maddening, but all of his earlier reticence had suddenly melted away.

Nate laughed. ‘Let’s fuck,’ he said. ‘Or is the empty fridge a sign that you don’t have rubbers, either?’

‘I’ve got some,’ Tim said, rolling over to the nightstand. He tipped the back of the box towards the window. ‘Hey, they’re even still in date.’

Tim would wake up the next morning to a random jumble of images from the night before, half-hard and marvelling at his luck. The kind of images that came from systematically debauching Nate. From pressing his almost-shaking fingers into Nate’s warm, desperate mouth, and then fingering him open until he was sweating. From the way their hands fumbled together, both of them working at the same goal; Nate twining their fingers together for a moment and squeezing, making Tim’s heart squeeze in time.

A car drove by with bright headlights. As Tim pushed into Nate with a slowness that was almost painful, the white-blue light fell across the lower half of Nate’s face. It curved down off his cheekbones, shadowing the hollows of his cheeks, and lit up his mouth. His mouth was half-open, lips wet. Tim closed his eyes and then reopened them, hardly breathing, and somehow Nate was still there, still in his bed, still under him, around him.

Somewhere in the distance a train rumbled by, and through the open window its noise hypnotically synchronised with the rattle of Nate’s breathing: in-out, in-out, in-out. Tim was acutely aware of his breathing, because he was feverishly kissing Nate’s mouth, his jaw, the fragile skin of his closed eyelids. If it was anyone else he would have been ashamed of how he was behaving. How eager he was to touch every inch of the person in his bed. But Nate was clinging to Tim’s hips with both hands, his feet hooked up over the back of Tim’s thighs. He was holding on with a desperation that was both very like, and very unlike, the Nate that Tim had thought he had known.

‘Don’t stop,’ Nate said into Tim’s jaw, blurrily but calmly. Tim stuttered mid-thrust.

‘If you say that it’s going to be over very quickly,’ he got out.

Nate laughed quietly, but not at Tim. Tim found himself smiling into the dark somehow. He hadn’t imagined that Nate would laugh so easily in his regular life. He liked it a lot. He wanted to make Nate laugh again, and keep laughing, possibly for the rest of their lives. But first he wanted to make Nate moan and maybe curse. So he did, finally succeeding in pushing away all the intrusive thoughts that had dogged him since Kuwait. He was wrapped up in the smell and feel of Nate, and the sounds he was making, and the flood of heat that was washing through him.

Nate came against Tim’s belly in his hand or in Tim’s hand, Tim couldn’t tell. With single-minded intensity, close himself, Tim fucked him through it until the only sound Nate could make were little high noises. One of the pillows had ended up almost on top of them, and Nate buried his face in it, grabbing at it with one hand and at Tim’s thigh with the other.

‘Tim, fuck,’ he said indistinctly. Tim buried his face in Nate’s sweaty neck and came, biting his lip until it bled so he didn’t say anything he’d regret.

* * *

‘I never went through with it.’ Tim said it very softly into the darkness, somehow hoping both that Nate was awake and asleep.

‘With what?’ Nate took a minute to respond. His head rustled against the pillow. The room smelled like him, like them. Tim took a long breath of it before he replied.

‘In Baghdad. I’d overheard Chaffin talking about a house where there were girls. I was angry—partly at you, partly at myself. Partly at the rules. So I went along, figuring I’d get something out of my system.’ He snorted even as he reached out for Nate in the darkness, putting his hand flat on Nate’s chest. Nate covered it with his own and listened without speaking. ‘Yeah, so I went there. And of course it was a fucking nightmare, and half the girls were probably underage. And I realised I couldn’t do it.’

‘I didn’t expect it of you. That’s why it took me so long to come here.’

‘Sorry.’

‘You have nothing to apologise for.’ Nate was almost certainly unaware of the reflexive snap of authority in his voice. ‘I thought to myself, what kind of man does that? Couldn’t fit it into my—my understanding of you. The upbringing. The education. Recon, but as a corpsman. Your choices in the field.’

‘You know, most people don’t recon their romantic prospects.’

‘Yes, they do.’ Nate’s response was immediate. ‘Most people don’t realise they do it, but they do.’

‘I don’t.’

‘No,’ said Nate pensively. He interlaced his fingers with Tim’s on his chest, and stroked the back of Tim’s hand with his fingertips. ‘But then you’re more romantic than I am.’

‘I’m insulted.’

Nate laughed softly into the darkness. ‘Of course you are. It’s true, though.’

‘_Romance_,’ said Tim, about to say something pithy and epigrammatic. Nate put a hand over his mouth.

‘Don’t ruin it for me.’

‘Ruin what?’ Tim said, muffled around Nate’s hand and barely intelligible.

‘The one good thing that came out of that whole shitshow.’ Nate was gesturing, making the mattress move.

‘Just one?’

‘The only one that matters, anyway,’ said Nate. He rolled in closer to Tim and pressed his face into Tim’s chest. Before Tim could come up with a reply, Nate was asleep.


End file.
